You need to wonder why someone is trying to pull the heart strings of those concerned about the environment. Who would benefit from getting the greenies mobilized against AI? Who wants to shift the conversation to concerns around the consumption of AI and why?
For a concrete example, because my company helped build this, there’s power plants in the USA wasting less electricity because AI is better able to combine data to predict demand. This is megawatts per day that never needs to be generated because of software running on a couple graphics cards in a server rack using a few hundred watts.
At least AI is more useful than crypto currencies but if we mainly get more spam text and fake images the energy costs aren't worth it.
Here is a “radical” idea for you. Let markets decide what energy is useful for or not!
Obviously there can be rules and regulations around how clean energy is and pollution, but the absolutely last thing the world needs is governments regulating what energy use is “good” or “bad”, unless you are itching to live in serious dystopian future.
The bad news is lots of profitable things have bad consequences but markets don't care.
The entire function of markets is to discover usefulness!
The primary role of government is to provide a rule of law for markets.
Should there be pollution? No
Should there be snake oil or harmful consumer products? No
Should there be fraud and deception? No
Guess what when those happen those are GOVERNMENT failures! Not market failures. Any profits from those activities are not the reason they happened, the governments failure is.
In an economy that has a functioning government with law and order and regulations to protect property rights and public goods, but no intervention, then:
Profits == Usefulness
It’s absolutely outrageous how current western culture has failed to teach basic economic facts. As I have said numerous times, this is equivalent to believing in creationism and teaching it in schools as truth while having overwhelming evidence of evolution. That’s the situation we are in.
Collectivism, socialism, communism, social democracy, social justice, whatever name you assign to this idea a central planner who should adjust the system, intervene. they are all fairy tales that are being taught as facts while we actually have undeniably scientific and hard evidence of how human societies function economically and structurally, amongst honest people, honest intellectuals, there is no question about what works and why. Well regulated markets, NOT with interventions or redistribution, are the single most positive force in human history. Unfortunately culture and politics are holding us back in western civilization with a rival of the failed fairytales of previous times.
The reason why communism fails is the same why the market fails, because humans aren't perfect.
By your logic a crime is never to blame on the perpetrator only on the government.
Do you know who also shifts responsibility like that?
Serial killers! "I did it because you didn't stop me."
If you recognize the product you are selling hurts or kills people and your first response is, as long as it is legal I don't care, then the failure doesn't lie in the government, the failure is you.
BTW there is no market, there are only people and people are responsible for what they are doing
However in markets those transactions are voluntary. In central planning they are involuntary.
When the transaction harms the buyer the reason that happens is the seller has deceived them and is certainly the underlying guilty party, that I agree.
I agree perfect governments are also a fairy tale.
All that said you don’t seem to recognize the heroic role of incentives and profits and markets in finding usefulness. That’s what triggers me. When people voluntarily pay for something it’s because they find it useful.
What you appear to claim is that governments need to be the arbiter of usefulness since the people cannot be trusted. That is a seriously dystopian approach.
Since a lot of power is still dirty, high energy usage should be curbed.
On the flip side, restricting energy usage impacts homes significantly more than businesses and creates poverty.
Look at the UK for energy poverty examples.